Landfills contribute to global warming

A SUPERMARKET and cookery club in Innerleithen have teamed up to give away food that has reached its sell-by date – and prevent it going to landfill. You Can Cook joined forces with the local Co-op to provide a new fridge-freezer allowing shoppers to help themselves to out-of-date items and reduce food waste. The new unit will be located at the main entrance of the store in Peebles Road, and will be stocked regularly by staff. Bosco Santimano from You Can Cook told us: “Customers are invited to check for any food that they may want to use rather than it ending up in landfills. “You Can Cook has been working with the local community of Walkerburn and Innerleithen for more than six years by organising and running cookery classes, gardening clubs, composting and reducing food waste workshops.” Statistics show that food waste costs £1 billion a year in Scotland alone, with 30 per cent of supermarket food thrown away. And organisers of the new … [Read more...] about Cookery club cooks up new food waste scheme

0 Have your say TIME does funny things between Christmas and New Year. Is it really only a week since we were opening presents and feasting on turkey and plum pudding? And nothing illustrates the strange effect of this seasonal time lapse more than the contents of a fridge. If yours is anything like mine, it’s probably still stuffed with all kinds of items left over from last week’s festivities. I’ll be having a rummage in there later to see what I can cook up into a pie or an omelette.I won’t throw anything away until it is literally crawling out of the fridge on its own legs. I was instructed in the ways of kitchen management by a grandmother who was born into poverty and worked in service as a cook through the Great Depression of the 1930s.Grandma Gladys made it clear that nothing whatsoever should be wasted. She would be proud of me as I stand there with the hand-held food processor, pulsing stale crusts into breadcrumbs to go in the freezer for … [Read more...] about Jayne Dowle: We need a war on waste to combat food bank queues

Litter-strewn beaches and trash-clogged coasts are unsightly, but it's what is invisible to the human eye that may pose a threat to animal and human health. The oceans are a veritable stew of sesame seed-sized bits of degraded plastic, commonly known as microplastics. They are either broken down from larger pieces of plastic or were already small particles, such as beads in facial scrubs. Each square kilometer of ocean has 63,320 such particles floating at the surface, according to one recent study. The 2016 United Nations Frontiers report estimates that East Asian seas are worst hit with levels some 27 times higher than average. Microplastics have been detected in environments as far-flung as Mongolian mountain lakes and the Arctic Circle. But what does that mean for human beings? The jury is still out on if and how microplastic impacts various animals, including humans. But there is growing evidence to suggest it has the potential to mess with our health. So much so, that the … [Read more...] about Is marine plastic pollution a threat to human health?